Trees have always been a pernicious thing for black people. What is happening to Nashville schools director Shawn Joseph is essentially a lynching.

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Fallon Wilson is research director at Black Tech Mecca and CEO of Black in Tech Nashville.

Billie Holiday crooned, “Southern trees bear strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze. Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees,” and, in the case of Nashville, cherry blossom trees.

There has been such a community outcry and community organizing on stopping the cutting of these cherry blossom trees that Mayor David Briley vowed they will be removed safely. Furthermore, more than 66,000 people signed a petition begging the Metro government not to cut the trees down. Even representatives of the NFL draft committee have apologized for such a gross oversight on their part.

This level of community engagement is inspiring because in a matter of days the entire Nashville community was united behind saving the cherry blossom trees.

However, trees have always been a pernicious thing for black people. At the turn of the previous century, it is estimated that more than 4,400 black people were lynched in Southern States between 1877 and 1950. In Tennessee alone, it is estimated that nearly 500 black men, black women and black children were sadistically strung up on trees by angry white mobs across many Tennessee counties including Davidson County.

Given Davidson County’s shameful history of racial terrorism of black people, community groups are organizing to claim and memorialize the Equal Justice Initiative Memorial steel coffin with the names of the lynched in Davidson County. Yes, trees have never meant joy for black people in this country. They have often symbolized fear and mob-sanctioned death.

Therefore, to see the grand efforts of Nashville residents organizing around saving the cherished and beloved cherry blossom trees, while so many are dreaming and implementing endless machinations to professionally lynch Director of Schools Dr. Shawn Joseph, leaves me wondering if Nashville, and greater Tennessee, has forgotten its lead part in Jim Crow and in lynching black bodies.

Has Nashville forgotten how it racially terrorized black students like John Lewis at the Woolworth counters? Has Nashville forgotten how it gouged out eyes and castrated black bodies before stringing them up on a tree to be lynched? Has Nashville forgotten how it believed the many white fabricated stories of black deviants as justification to hang black bodies from trees?

If this can happen to Shawn Joseph, it can happen to any black person

I truly hope Nashville will reclaim its Equal Justice Initiative Memorial’s steel coffin of the named black men and black women lynched in Davidson County. By doing this, I believe it would help Nashville residents to reflect on their current treatment of Dr. Joseph which is mob-like, lynch-like. Literally, there are school board members, aided by wickedness in high places on the state level that seek to strip him of his teaching license. They have even asked people to come in masks and spew their anger and hatred of Dr. Joseph.

Of course, those who are engaged in these things would not see themselves as people who would lynch a black man or black woman, but white supremacy is an odious and intoxicating scent that if one has not done the emotional work to deconstruct one’s own white privilege than that person is likely to default to it when encountering an issue with a black person, let alone the first black director of schools.

I truly believe Nashville leaders should be concerned with what happened to Dr. Joseph. Not only because of his legacy of equity work, like the redistribution of Title I funding and restorative justice, in MNPS will likely be undone after he transitions, but also because of Nashville forgotten history of state-sanctioned violence against black bodies.

Every person of color in the city has watched all of this unfold, knowing that if white supremacy can get away with doing this to Dr. Joseph than it can also do it to every other person of color in Nashville. Those who currently live here and those who are thinking about moving here to work. The message is: “We do not belong here, and it is not safe for our kind to live here in Nashville.”

Dr. Fallon Wilson is research director at Black Tech Mecca and co-founder and CEO of Black in Tech Nashville.